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Tijuana, the bullring rising like Rome’s Colosseum out of the clutter.
    A few surfers are riding the breaks at Boca Rio and the Sloughs, where the Tijuana River empties into the sea. It’s one of the most polluted stretches of beach in California, but this doesn’t scare the hard-cores. Raw sewage, floating garbage, and the occasional dismembered narco do nothing to discourage them from paddling out to catch the world-class waves. The county has given up trying to stop them, offering free hepatitis vaccines instead.
    Pablo Honey is fishing in his usual spot halfway down the pier, his line just back of where the waves are breaking twenty feet below. Elbows on the rail, he reels in some slack: CLICK, CLICK, CLICK. He’s using a live anchovy on a number four hook, hopes for halibut. Nothing in his bucket yet. Malone doesn’t mean to startle him, but his “What’s up?” sends the kid tripping over his shoelaces.
    “Easy, dude,” Malone says. “It’s just me.”
    Pablo laughs and nods and fiddles with his Padres cap for a while, pulling himself together. “Got a new girlfriend,” he barks when he finally calms down. Words tend to explode out of him, everything an exclamation.
    “Another one?” Malone replies.
    “White chick, big ol’ titties.”
    “Come on.”
    “No shit. We’re getting married.”
    “So let’s celebrate. You got a bottle on you?”
    It’s a crapshoot. Some days Pablo likes a nip while he fishes, other days he feels the Lord all around him and packs a New Testament instead. Malone gets lucky: The kid reaches into the pocket of his camo cargo shorts, pulls out a pint of Popov, and hands it over.
    Pablo Honey is half Chinese, half Mexican, and his real last name is Estrada. He and Malone lived in the same building in L.A. a few years back, a hundred-buck-a-week flophouse in Hollywood, Little Armenia. Pablo washed dishes to pay his rent while Malone pissed away a nice chunk of change his grandfather had left him.
    Malone was generous with his money, treating his down-and-out pals to drinks and steak dinners at Sizzler, and Pablo was the only guy who tried to pay him back. He was also the only guy who never asked what the hell someone like him was doing in a dump like that. Malone appreciated the kid’s uncomplicated acceptance of his and others’ circumstances, found wisdom in it even, and the two of them helped each other along as best they could, like friends Malone had only read about in books.
    He was heartbroken when Pablo announced one day that he’d inherited a little house in Imperial Beach from an aunt and would soon be moving down there.
    “Good for you,” he said. “But I’ll be awful lonely.”
    “Huh?” Pablo said.
    “I’m going to miss you, man. You’re my bud.”
    Pablo frowned, deep in thought for a few seconds, then smiled and said, “So come with me, then.”
    Malone had moved up to L.A. and settled into the flop when his life in Orange County ended, and he figured he’d be there until he drank himself into an early grave. But Pablo’s offer got him thinking. After five years of slipping in vomit on the way to the liquor store and passing out at night to the sound of men in other rooms wrestling with their nightmares, he hated the constant madness of Hollywood. Whatever misery he’d been seeking, he’d experienced; whatever point he’d been trying to make to himself, he’d made it. So, after throwing one last party for all of his Tinseltown cronies, he packed his stuff in the Louis Vuitton bag he’d ended up with after the divorce and followed Pablo to the beach, crashing on the kid’s couch until he found his own place. It’s been two years now, and he’s still here and still alive—quite an achievement, he’s decided, for someone who so often wants to die.
    He guzzles some vodka and passes the bottle back to Pablo, who reams the neck with a T-shirted finger and has a drink himself. A gull touches down on the railing, looking for something to steal.